A Gustav 30 in 30, #6: American Beauty

[Gustav 6,469]

 

In which @Advantage accidentally offered me a $1 bonus, which I purposely accepted, which made the portal look like we were in cap trouble.

 

 

Expansion was the name of the game back in the day. S65 saw the founding of the Moscow Menace franchise, along with two additions to the VHLM in Houston and Philly. I'd played for Houston and was fairly intrigued when I saw that the big league would be expanding again right in time for me to join it. The Malmo logo looked cool, the limited impressions I'd had of inaugural GM Advantage seemed positive, and I just really liked the idea of being a team's history rather than simply adding to it. They were also one of a handful of teams to actually scout me, which is something I don't care about as heavily now but did as a first-gen. 

 

In the days leading up to the draft, I had a good time taking in the new member experience. I remember @MubbleFubbles writing a mock draft that said some nice things about me, and I took that idea and made what's still one of my favorite articles ever--my own mock draft, 50 picks deep, that taught me everything I needed to know about every player when I was writing it. I really knew nothing ahead of time about who was going where, but correctly speculated on a bunch of things. Some that I'm proud of were Julius Freeman over Shane Mars to Vancouver at #2 overall, Apollo Hackett to Riga at #16, Edward Vigneault at #33, and Rhys Chism at #39--oh, and my very own Jerry Garcia, 7th overall to Malmo and the first player ever to be drafted to the Nighthawks.

 

My mock was weirdly accurate with Malmo picks in general. I ended up joining Rusty Shackleford (@K1NG LINUS) and Nacho (@Nacci25), picked 17th and 37th overall in both my article and the actual draft. Also of note were goaltender Juan Jaundice (@Jus) and monster goon MORPHEUS DESTRUCTIOUS (@Abaddon), as well as Blake Laughton and @Grape, my VHLM teammate and the only other member of Malmo's inaugural draft class to be active today. I knew some of these people already, and the time that all were active was enough for me to get to know the rest. Our locker room was super active and a really fun place to be in general, removing quite a bit of the doubt that many players have when they leave the M. But of course, we were an expansion team that finished last in S66. Garcia played just-OK and wasn't really anything special despite having lots of empty space on the roster to stand out from.

 

These trends would continue in S67, where the team got marginally better and so did Jerry. Worse, we already had a couple of our S66 picks go inactive. There was some sort of foundation built, at least (we drafted @Phil's Phil Marleau and @fonziGG's Michael Johnson, players that stuck with us at forward and in net for a while)--and we figured it wouldn't be too-too long before things started going the right direction.

 

And go the right direction it did in just the next season--not only did we pick @OrbitingDeath 's Condor Adrienne (the best defenseman of the generation) at #1 after winning the draft lottery, but @Beketov's Matt Thompson (the best player of the S60s) signed with us in free agency for his last season. A few things happened in S68 that were really nice. First, Garcia had his best season on defense. His stats (60 points, 154 hits, and 150 SB) may not mean a whole lot to anyone used to the standards of the S90s, but they were pretty solid for that time and got me nominated for the Jake Wylde Trophy. And though the vote had solid support, it fell one short of winning. I still haven't won an individual award not named Campbell, and this was the closest I ever came.

 

But I digress--S68 had a whole lot more going on as far as the team was concerned. We went from the VHL's basement all the way to the top, finishing first place in the standings and taking home the Victory Cup in just our third season of existence. At some point in our first few seasons--and I think it was here--Advantage became the first VHL member to ever hit 1000 wins as a GM. All of that was cool, and we carried that success into the playoffs, where regular-season MVP Thompson played so well--shooting at somewhere around 20%--that it drew accusations of sim rigging and the strongest demand for live sims up until that point. That's the reason why we have live sims today, actually--it's not a special event as much as it's proof that the simmer isn't cheating.

 

The playoffs went very well, and we made the finals with the chance of becoming the earliest championship winners of any expansion team in the league's history. The finals had been simmed live before S68, so doing them this way was as much common practice as it was the result of peer pressure. So, we did them live--and although I never once believed that the sims were being rigged, the people who thought they were certainly had something to laugh at when we got swept by Seattle (whose core by this point was made up of multiple players who used to be my own first-gen players in the M). It was my first finals, and would remain so for quite a while.

 

After S68, my player success (and my team success) declined steadily. I don't remember a whole lot about S69-71 as a player, to be honest--S69 was my best run as a VHLM GM (as I'll talk about in a future article), and I remember S70 being absolutely dominated by Moscow. Also during this time, Garcia somehow acted as Condor Adrienne's kryptonite. He didn't even steal stats, either, because his totals went down a little bit even as I kept adding to his TPE. But after S71, Advantage stepped down, @FrostBeard took over as GM and started the team's first rebuild, at the start of which he was gracious enough to give me a fair deal to move Garcia out to the Davos team I was then running. That's also a future article, but the long story short is that I made Jerry a winger and enjoyed a couple seasons of being half decent on my own underachieving team before retiring. 

 

Jerry Garcia would eventually finish his career with 420 points (an amazing coincidence). He never won a Cup or an award and was never really the top player on any of his teams. He doesn't even come close to making my own Hall of Not Bad series. In fact, I believe that he was the worst player to ever reach 1500 TPE back when 1500 TPE actually meant something. But even though his TPE total was his most impressive number, that's still representative of over a year of work that I put into making him what he was, and I have no regrets about it (not even the part where I built Passing over Scoring). Jerry taught me that I could make it in the VHL as more than just a flashy new kid, that I could earn with the best of them and build a player that most people still respected even when that didn't show up on the leaderboard. And I hope no one who played with him regretted it, either. There were lots of players drafted after 7th overall in S66, but none of them can say that they were Malmo's first choice--and I like to think Malmo wouldn't have had it any other way.

[Phil 5,129]

Great times :cheers:

[Berocka 2,263]

Where are the links to the other 5

[Advantage 2,899]

That original Malmo LR was so fun.